Opinion | Forget the Thucydides Trap – a ‘rising’ China has no desire to go to war with the US, and Washington needs to dispel its paranoia

Zhengxu Wang says China only wants its territorial rights and to ensure higher living standards for its people – and the idea that the US ‘rules’ the world is a myth that needs to be debunked

Reading Time:3 minutes

Chinese citizens look at their flag as they sing their national anthem during the opening ceremony of the FINA Swimming Short Course World Championships in Hangzhou on December 11. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 10:30am, 25 Dec 2018Updated: 2:21pm, 25 Dec 2018

As China commemorates the 40th anniversary of formal diplomatic relations with the United States, the arrest of Meng Wanzhou – the CFO of one of China’s top technology companies, Huawei, by Canadian authorities on behalf of the US – appears to vindicate the Thucydides Trap thesis that the US and China may be locked into a path to war.

Professor Graham Allison, the Harvard academic who helped publicise the thesis, recently gave a series of talks in major universities in China. Given the tense bilateral relations between China and the US, it is comforting to see that academic visits between the two countries are still going on.

Everywhere he went, he was given a very cordial reception by students. During the Q&A sessions, they were eager to ask questions. And they asked very good ones – there was no anger, no attacking US behaviour or policies but, instead, genuine questions that built up a dialogue between a US academic and young Chinese.

Allison commented that young students in the US and China alike are global citizens, and that they like each other. On US campuses, he had witnessed them working together very well, he related. With such people-to-people amity, it would be hard to imagine the two nations bound for war.

But the worries about the relationship between the two giants are real. In fact, another renowned Harvard academic, Ezra Vogel, who also visited China recently, expressed deep concern. However, while listening to Allison, one quickly realises that all this talk about the so-called Thucydides Trap is simply the outcome of fear that shouldn’t have been created in the first place.

For example, regarding whether China is rising or has risen, Allison’s answer is “yes” to both. But how did we get this answer? Allison showed the reduction of the poverty rate from 90 per cent in 1978 in China to 1 per cent in 2014; the speed at which a highway bridge in Beijing was fixed (comparing it to a much smaller bridge-fixing project in Boston that was left unfinished for several years); the size of Chinese trade and manufacturing, etc.